1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a communication terminal such as an e-mail terminal, etc., a reception notifying method for e-mail reception, and a computer-readable recording medium storing a program for executing the reception notifying method.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, the widest-spreading mobile communication terminals such as portable phones have not only a call function but also an e-mail sending and receiving function using the Internet.
When an e-mail is received, such a mobile communication terminal notifies the user of the reception of the e-mail, for example, by outputting a ring alert from its speaker or by vibrating itself using the vibrator function. This notification is normally given in the same way irrespective of how the received e-mails are important or urgent.
Therefore, each time the user is notified of reception of an e-mail, he/she has to check the sender, the subject, and in some case, the e-mail body of the newly received e-mail, by opening the folder in which the received e-mail is stored, in order not to miss any e-mails that are highly important or urgent.
An information processing apparatus disclosed in, for example, Unexamined Japanese Patent Application KOKAI Publication No. 2002-297507 is one solution to this problem. This information processing apparatus notifies the user of reception of an e-mail, by reproducing the audio of the reception notifying message by changing the sound quality, the sound volume, the reproducing speed, etc. depending on the header information of the received e-mail. The user is therefore enabled to determine the degree of importance or urgency of the e-mail without checking the sender and the subject of the e-mail.
However, the apparatus disclosed in Unexamined Japanese Patent Application KOKAI Publication No. 2002-297507 notifies the user of reception of an e-mail each time it receives an e-mail, though it changes the manner of outputting the reception notifying message e-mail by e-mail. This might bother the user when the user has many works to do. However, if the user sets a silent mode to have no notifications given so as not to be bothered, this in turn puts the user at a risk of missing any e-mails that are important or urgent.